The Grenfell Judgment: 7 years too late and were is Cameron’s Guilt? By Barry Biddulph
 

According to a Guardian headline, the Grenfell fire and the tragic outcome was caused by dishonesty and greed. But dishonesty and greed was not the cause, but the symptom of a Capitalist system which put profits before the working class residents of Grenfell.

Specifically, the Neo Liberal deregulation and austerity agenda of Cameron and Osborn and their local authority Tory leaders facilitated profit rich companies to dodge regulations or having no regulatory restraint on their profits.

These Neo Liberal politicians allowed the fire risk and safety the residents to be put on one side or disregarded. These guilty Tory politicians at a local and national level have blood on their hands.

Will there will be justice? To make guilty politicians and civil servants accountable would endanger the state and Westminster Government. The state, Parliament and Whitehall serves a rich elite, a small few not the many.

The state can only function with deception and protection of its senior leaders. To prosecute Neo Liberal politicians would destabilize the entire political set up going back to Tony Blair and other statemen who are still alive. For capitalist politicians, to jail company bosses would be unthinkable and seriously damage business confidence

This scandal is not the first or the last fire where working class lives have been lost in council flats-Camberwell and Liverpool come to mind. In no other scandal have the guilty state and government officials been made accountable.

The NHS Blood scandal, the Post office, Hillsborough and others are still fighting for justice after decades. We have to keep on fighting to put humanity before profit. In other words, Socialism. ▲

Workers Power grovels to US imperialism yet again By Gerry Downing
 

The truly scandalous position of some on the left have taken on the Ukraine war is consistent with their previous positions on the 2011 wars in Libya and then Syria. Workers Power have some excellent positions on the war in Gaza, on the need for a rank-and-file opposition to the trade union bureaucracy but supporting the EU/Nato in Libya and Syria was beyond the pale.

There were some differences on Ukraine but these were resolved in their Political Committee Statement, Socialists and the war in Ukraine 01 July 2023 “Putin sees Ukraine as part of Russia’s rightful empire; assembled under the Tsars from the 16th to the early 19th century by conquest and colonisation” they tell us.

 “Ukraine is, in global terms, a small nation caught between two imperialist power blocs who look on it greedily, due to its natural resources, its educated workforce that is ripe for super-exploitation by multinationals, and its geo-strategic position”.

No serious Marxist considers Russia an imperialist power like the US and its Nato allies. The GDP comparison between the two sides here are over 100 to 1 in the US favour. And look how diplomatically they treat the fascist-led US sponsored Maidan coup:

“Ukraine exploded into violence with the Maidan movement and subsequent coup in 2014, followed by the open seizure by Russia of Crimea and its support for pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, the predominantly Russian speaking provinces of eastern Ukraine collectively known as the Donbas. A substantial part of the population of this region had been alienated by the deployment of Western Ukrainian forces and fascist militias in the wake of the Maidan coup, in which the latter played a key part.”

And that’s the last we hear of the role of the fascists in Ukraine today. Now, “Stalinists, and even some self-designated Trotskyists, who consider the USA to be the only serious imperialist power, still see any state that opposes it as somehow ‘anti-imperialist’” they tell us, in a very obvious political grovel to the US, the global hegemonic imperialist power.

It seems there were some leftists in WP who opposed the US/Nato arming Ukraine but the Congress sorted them, “this position would have weakened the self-defence of the popular masses, and would also have weakened the struggle for working class leadership of the defensive struggle in Ukraine.” How will we ever make that socialist revolution without Donald Trump’s assistance?

They conclude by fence-sitting, “Internationalists worldwide must resist being drawn into any of the imperialist camps, either by their claims to represent democracy, or anti imperialism.”▲